SimCity launching more servers

The launch of Maxis's new SimCity has been something of a mess, to put it mildly, with players facing long queues to even launch what is chiefly a single-player game. Good job, always-online DRM. Maxis has issued a statement saying it's "putting everything we have" towards fixing up the servers and squashing bugs. The city-building sim launches in Europe today, so let's hope that doesn't overload things further.

The launch of Maxis's new SimCity has been something of a mess, to put it mildly, with players facing long queues to even launch what is chiefly a single-player game. Good job, always-online DRM. Maxis has issued a statement saying it's "putting everything we have" towards fixing up the servers and squashing bugs. The city-building sim launches in Europe today, so let's hope that doesn't overload things further.

"What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues. We are also paying close attention to all the bug reports we are receiving from our fans," Maxis said yesterday. The developer says it's released several updates since launch, and has the live ops team "working 24/7." Poor live ops team.

Here's a big chunk of text:

This has been an exciting and challenging week for the team here at Maxis, the culmination years of planning and development. We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from our fans which has made it even more upsetting for us that technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours. We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues.

If you're held up by the game stalling at 'Checking for updates', you can at least do something about that. The fix requires you to dig around and delete some files, so follow EA's instructions.

When it comes to fixing everything else wrong with SimCity, though, you're at EA's mercy. It's a shame, really, because our review says a jolly nice game lies beneath that awful DRM.